


ballads, wine, and orchids

by middlecyclone



Category: Buzzfeed: Worth It (Web Series)
Genre: Food, M/M, POV First Person, Style Over Substance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 20:07:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15420612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlecyclone/pseuds/middlecyclone
Summary: This fic heavily borrows, spiritually if not conceptually, from the novel Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler, a very silly book I love very much. This fic is extremely self-indulgent and was basically just an excuse for me to let loose and write all the absurd, heavily stylistic nonsense I don't bother with most of the time, but hopefully it's enjoyable anyway!Title from Hymnostic by Big Red Machine.





	ballads, wine, and orchids

**Author's Note:**

> This fic heavily borrows, spiritually if not conceptually, from the novel Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler, a very silly book I love very much. This fic is extremely self-indulgent and was basically just an excuse for me to let loose and write all the absurd, heavily stylistic nonsense I don't bother with most of the time, but hopefully it's enjoyable anyway! 
> 
> Title from Hymnostic by Big Red Machine.

_BITTER: always a bit unanticipated. Coffee, chocolate, rosemary, citrus rinds, wine. Once, when we were wild, it told us about poison. The mouth still hesitates at each new encounter. We urge it forward, say, Adapt. Now, enjoy it._

― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

 

It wasn’t because he was beautiful, although he was. His hair was the shiny gold-brown of wheat in the late-summer sun; his eyes were blue and clear and his arms filled his soft cotton shirts out perfectly, and it wouldn’t be true to say I didn’t notice. But that’s not why it happened, not really; I’m a human being so I’m inherently shallow so I can’t honestly say that it didn’t contribute. But I’m not that shallow; not that reduced to my base human desires.

It would be closer to the truth to say that one morning I was just sitting at my desk when he walked in and handed me a piece of warm, freshly baked bread and told me to take a bite, and I did.

We had spoken before that, of course, but always professionally, working through the universal pre-written social script of polite niceties that we both pulled out, reading out of the edition for working together when you also like each other just fine.

This was different. This was strange.

I think maybe I wouldn’t have gotten obsessed if the bread hadn’t been good, but it had been and so I did. It was soft, pillowy and steamy with a shiny outer crust; it was like eating a solid, substantial, carefully leavened cloud.

I asked him if he had made it. He just nodded.

I thought it was good, _really_ good, and I told him that too.

“Thanks,” he said.

There was a long moment of silence, where I finished eating the bread and he just watched me. He watched the way I tore it with my hands, the way I shoved it in my mouth, the way I chewed and swallowed and savored every bite.

And then he left.

•

So when I needed someone to eat with me, I thought of him. I didn’t ask him, not right away, because I knew the answer would be no, but he was always my first pick, from the very beginning.

And I got him. Eventually.

•

Being around him was everything I thought I had ever wanted, until I actually got it and realized that his mere presence barely cracked the surface of what I actually wanted. But I didn’t have the words for what I wanted from him, not even inside the space of my own head, and so my cravings turned outward, turned from carnal to carnivorous.

Together we ate steak, pasta, salmon. Salt, fat, acid, heat. I’d always had a sweet tooth, for as long as I can remember having any teeth at all, but it abandoned me suddenly in this time. All I wanted to eat was meat, fish, cheese. I craved savory, umami; that first melting buttersoft bite of rare steak; the flaky oily silky richness of salmon filet; the plump pop of shrimp and the too-salty, too-dry graininess of Parmesan. We ate decadent truffle after decadent truffle together, prepared a half-dozen different ways, notable more for the price tag than anything else. We ate their richness and tasted the dirt from whence they came and I thought about the strange nature of mushrooms, the oddity of the fact that they only grow out of the death of other organisms.

Yet isn’t everything we eat grown out of death?

The best things are, anyway.

The best things are dry-aged, or fermented, or carefully and delicately allowed to spoil in just the right ways. It’s that hint of spoiling that makes them perfect, I think. It’s a warning to us that timing is everything, and a warning that no matter how perfect anything is at the time of consumption, the end is just around the corner. And that end comes for us all, whether we’re ready or not.

We chased death, hunting it down in a delicate bite-sized portion, and had the time of our lives in the process.

•

I started drinking water, all the time. I was so thirsty, constantly; my mouth was a dry and barren desert and my throat ached around the clock. I kept a glass of water by my bed and then, when it was invariably empty well before morning, two, and I drained them both.

I never left my apartment without a water bottle in my backpack. I never left _anywhere_ without a water bottle in my backpack.

It wasn’t about him but it wasn’t not about him either. Correlation doesn’t imply causation but every time I saw him it was like a wave of desiccation consumed me; every time his hand brushed mine it was like every cell in my body shriveled up, oversalinated, and called out for a drink. It was psychosomatic, I could feel it being psychosomatic, but knowing something is false and stopping yourself from feeling it are two different things.

After one afternoon shoot where he spent ninety minutes with an arm wrapped around my shoulders, I downed three full Nalgene bottles in twenty desperate, shaky minutes.

It was like my body knew I wanted something but wasn’t sure what, and defaulted back to water as a universal cure for an ineffable, indefinable affliction. I wasn’t sure myself what I wanted—but I got closer to the truth than that.

•

Let me tell it again: it’s not that he was such a sparklingly attractive personality that the whole room lit up when he walked in, or anything ridiculous like that. It’s more like he was _never_ lit up, never bright or animated or showing any real emotion at all, and I kept watching him like he was a bird in a nature special, waiting for his facade to crack, waiting for the tiniest sliver of his actual personality to shine through.

But it never did.

I would talk to him, _flirt_ even, almost every day. At our desks, at the coffee maker, in the hallways before and after meetings. And he always talked back, sometimes even _flirted_ back, but I could still tell that it was all always a performance; an expertly constructed and near-flawless one, yes, but still a lie. I don’t think most people realized that, but I also don’t think most people spent more hours than not watching the flex of his hands, the flash of his eyes, the curl of sandy hair on the back of his neck. I saw the seams of the falsehood but I couldn’t peel it back, not ever, not even an inch, and I know that he felt me trying, prying, scrying my own truths in lieu of his own, and he did nothing except draw the shroud of invention tighter around his shoulders.

But he did see me, then. Most people do, eventually, because I talk a little too loud and dye my hair a little too brightly and that’s my shroud, in a way, the color and volume compensating for an inherent shyness and insecurity that I have done my absolute best to leave in my adolescence. I don’t think that’s why he started paying attention, though. I think he started paying attention because he saw me see him, and he didn’t get worried because his lies were better than my eyes, but he tasted the faintest hint of the faintest possibility of discovery and he wanted a closer view. And maybe that is why I got closer than most people: because I’m experienced at constructing who I want to be. But what the two of us do is fundamentally different, when you really get down to it: because when he finally started looking, I let him in.

•

If I was water, he was wine.

•

He asked if he could kiss me, one evening after an interminably long day of shooting in the sun and the sea and I said yes, because I’d been saying yes and yes and yes to this same question for months before he’d even dreamed of asking it, saying yes with my eyes and my hands and my stomach and now, finally, it was my turn to say yes with my mouth and I took it.

Being kissed by him wasn’t at all like I’d dreamed; in some of my most fervent, private fantasies, he was all over me, shoving me against walls, grabbing me by my shoulders and my neck and my wrists and kissing me like the world was ending, like he was dying for it, like he only had and had only ever had eyes for me.

And in other, more fervent, even more private fantasies, he kissed me like I was an animated princess and he was my animated prince and the kiss was gentle, gallant, romantic, tender; I dreamed of him cradling my face in his hands and telling me he loved me and pressing his lips into mine in an endless, fairytale, storybook kiss.

It was none of those things. It was slow at first, like dripping honey, then quick, a spray across my tongue like grapefruit juice as he licked deeper inside. He didn’t hesitate, he just deliberated, and I let him. It wasn’t passion, it wasn’t romance, it was just two people coming together in one moment and then that moment stretching, extending across seconds into minutes, refusing to end.

He didn’t taste like anything, and he didn’t smell like anything, and he didn’t feel like anything except himself, and it was everything I needed all at once, overwhelming me even as I begged for more.

But it wasn’t hunger I felt. It was, at last, satiation.

• 

I asked him, once, later, after everything had ended, if any of it was real.

“Yes,” he said, “and no.”

I asked him also what he meant by that.

“It was all an act, all of it, every moment. But some of it was real, too. Things can be both at the same time.”

“And this? Is this real?”

He didn’t answer. He just took a whole raspberry and put it in my mouth.

The raspberry was sour, almost too sour, but the skin was kitten-soft and warm from the sunlight. I didn’t bite it, because his fingers were still between my teeth, but I crushed the fruit to the roof of my mouth with my tongue until it became a thin pancake of pips; thin, tart juice burst outward, becoming everything I tasted, becoming my whole world.

There’s a strange metallicity to raspberries, like the July sun, like brand new pennies fluorescing on the sidewalk, like electricity in the air after a thunderstorm, like blood.

It was all the answer I needed.

 •

_SWEET: granular, powdered, brown, slow like honey or molasses. The mouth-coating sugars in milk. Once, when we were wild, sugar intoxicated us, the first narcotic we craved and languished in. We’ve tamed, refined it, but the juice from a peach still runs like a flash flood._

― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter


End file.
